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Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2020

Andrew M. Engelhardt Open the ORCID record for Andrew M. Engelhardt [Opens in a new window]
Andrew M. Engelhardt*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: andrew_engelhardt@brown.edu
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Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that racial attitudes, by forming through early socialization processes, are causally prior to most things political, including whites' party identifications. Yet a broad literature demonstrates that partisanship can shape mass attitudes. The author argues that this influence extends even to presumptively fundamental predispositions like racial attitudes. The study applies cross-lagged models to panel data from the 1990s and 2000s to demonstrate that whites align their racial attitudes with their party loyalties. The results demonstrate that partisanship has a more pronounced influence in the latter time period, which is consistent with a view that changes in the political context can make partisanship a more likely causal force on other attitudes. Racial concerns not only provide a foundation for political conflict: my results reveal that political processes can increase or decrease racial animus.

Keywords

partisanshipprejudiceracial attitudespolarization

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Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 1062 - 1079
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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